Day 4 - Foreign Language, Swearing and Microwaves
I have come to the realization that I won’t be able to go home for the weekend, as was planned. By the time I get there (4 hours on a bus) and do my homework, it’ll be time to come back again. So rather than play yo-yo’s, I’ll just stay here in Auckland. At least I’ll get to swan on my balcony for more than 10 minutes at a time. I’m looking forward to that!
We mangled some more Greek this morning. First we had to come up with 9 phrases – three that we felt would be 100% necessary if traveling in Greece, three that would be 50% necessary and three that would be 20%. Then we had to create a couple of different role-plays with a partner each. In the first one, I got to play a waiter. It’s funny how a snooty waiter attitude can translate itself across different cultures. Everyone recognizes someone with a towel over their arm and a sneer on their face.
In the other role-play, we were two travelers trying to find our way to the Parthenon Backpackers. I imagine with our accents, we’d be told where to go and how to get there all right…
It was a wee bit different today. Yesterday the tutor started off with dialogue of her own and we had to guess what was being said. She didn’t use much in the way of gestures at first and that made it really tricky. We picked up on the greetings and the work Acropolis, but after that we were completely lost. It sounds so different from English! And they use rather an alarming ‘hoick’ sound when uses ‘h’s. How a person’s supposed to do that without spitting I don’t know. Today we pretty much just picked the tutor’s brains for the words we wanted and wrote our dialogue for the role-plays, which we than presented.
The whole Greek language thing was a really good exercise. I could feel myself going through different stages. Firstly, curiosity, then confusion, then being flustered, then out and out annoyed because my brain wasn’t able to keep up with the pace of the lesson. My gray matter just wanted to grapple with the words I’d got stuck on, and that’s what my concentration got locked into. The rest was just an annoying bunch of sounds that began to feel like an assault. My puny little brain was quickly reaching overload and I can now understand how people could actually almost come to blows in such a situation.
We have to keep a ‘foreign language journal’ and I can see how that’s going to be a vital piece of equipment. We’re to write about our experiences and feelings in learning an unknown language (and I shall not be putting the swearwords I was using in there, because the tutor gets to read it). We have all vowed to look back on our journals regularly in the future to remember what it’s like for our students to have someone coming at them with a whole new bunch of sounds and expecting them to have them memorized after a one hour session!
This afternoon we had to prepare our lessons, etc for our first solo flight into teaching. I’m going to do one on Getting Personal Info-Street Interviews. My characters so far include Oprah Windy the Weathergirl, Speedy Bob the Pizza Delivery man and Rotten Ron the Interior Decorator that is also a chess expert. Again, we had to write the dreaded Lesson Plans at ninety miles an hour and tonight I’ll be drawing another 27 pictures, memorizing my dialogue, creating handouts, etc. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get to eat too. The supermarket ‘frozen meals’ section and the microwave are getting a sound thrashing so far. Maybe I’ll be able to glow in the dark by the time the course is finished. Now there’s a trick that’d come in handy if the power goes out.
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